Neverland
by milkmoth
Summary: There are places you can be young forever. Fran/Balthier.


a/n: Originally posted on livejournal. I think I broke my heart a little writing this, BUT. If you enjoy it, please comment telling me what you liked and I will love you forever.

* * *

The rings, she notices first. They smell of humes and factories. The cheap plastic. She never wants those near her, she thinks.

His eyes, like amber, she notices second. His youth. And his love for his ship, and, later, his love of those childish rings. They remind her of her love of colored glass, when she was a child. She used to find fragments in the Wood. Jote and Mjrn could not understand. Jote scoffed at her. Mjrn wanted to understand. She would pick up the pieces and try to put them together. Fran wanted to tell her, they were better apart.

She had no idea how those bits of glass got there. She sometimes wondered but, when she was a child, she learned to pay little mind to humes. She did not think of travelers lost to the beasts, consumed, of their death cries echoing through the jungle. She did not think that those bits of trampled glass were all that time left to mark their feeble, fragile lives.

She thought them pretty.

* * *

On their first steal, he deviates from the plan.

"They're not here," he says, shutting a book as Fran examines the magnifying glass. The maker inlaid pink diamonds and lapis lazuli into the handle. Judging by the imperfect beauty of the cuts, he would have been dead for many generations. His work had lived on. "Vacationing. We've more time than I anticipated."

Balthier leaves the book carelessly on the table, swinging his legs as he draws himself up on the desk. "Still looking at that trifle, Fran?"

"It holds value," she says, handing it to him. He gives it a look, running his ringed fingers over the jewels and engravings. She watches.

He slips it into a pocket inside his vest. He knows as well as she does its worth. "Now, before we venture upstairs to the lady's jewel box, do you have any further fancies?"

Fran spots something in the corner of the room. Something grand and gilded, a box made of gleaming wood, topped with something resembling a trumpet. He looks where she's looking and sees the record player. Wordlessly, he swings himself off the table and fiddles with it. Scratchy music fills the room. He looks to Fran, only to find her ears erect.

"You've never heard a record player," he guesses.

"It plays music," she says.

He nods at her and, holding his arms out, smiles.

"Care to dance?"

She stares at him for a moment, but he does not waver.

"I know not how."

"It's never too late to learn," he replies, "and, if all else fails, do as I have always done and invent something better."

She suddenly realizes that her limbs are too long, her shoulders too high. But she goes to him, anyway, and he manages, somehow, to keep his toes from under her heels.

"Good, very well done. You're a quick learner. Very graceful."

The way of the viera, she wants to say.

"One, two – here, no, it's just a waltz – and here, and go, and one and two-"

She hears the song in his voice. Tenor. She recognizes it. The Wood speaks to her in his voice.

He laughs.

She thinks of the jewels they will steal. She thinks of the portraits on the walls, of a man that looks eerily like Balthier and a woman who looks thoroughly meek and Archadian, their young children lined up at their knees.

He sweeps her around suddenly, a mimicry of flirtation.

She does not laugh, but she smiles for him.

* * *

That night, she pulls out her favorite shards – a dark blue the color of winter evening, a rose-pink the color of summer sunrise – and wonders why she has kept them all this time.

* * *

His name was Balthier, Balthier No-last-name. Like in all the great legends, the hero had no history.

Fran understood that. Most days she didn't have any history, either.

He treated his ship well, was good to her. Treated her like a lover and a child and a mother, all wrapped up in one. She learned fast (the way of a viera), but he had knowledge and training and quick wit, always quick wit. She watched him change in his resolve, in his views, his age, but never in his wit.

She wondered if he had an ugly past, because he never talked about it. She knew because she had… not an ugly past, but a past so beautiful and serene that leaving it was an act of death itself.

* * *

It's after the Bahamut that Fran notices a new ring in Balthier's collection. The ring, platinum and thick, is a man's ring. It nonetheless threatens to fall off, because it is a little too large for Balthier's thin fingers. He sets it on the ring finger of his left hand, along with one of his glittery rubber rings, and she wonders if he thought she wouldn't notice. Because she does. And it burns, to see this mortal ring there, a flimsy wish, because Balthier has never been solely wishes and is not a flimsy thing.

It is the ring of the Princess Ashe's dead husband and Balthier, like a love-struck fool, wears it around his ring finger. Not to parade her shame, but to parade his own.

* * *

She waits outside the ship while he goes to see her. With the dome opened, she occupies herself by counting the stars. By the time she hears his steps, the signal of his return, she has counted more stars than she has numbers. He gives her a long look.

She sits up and looks at him back. She has never had trouble meeting his eye.

* * *

If there was a damsel in distress, Balthier was always ready to play the hero. There have been countless girls in the streets who have tripped to be saved by his steady arm, countless crying damsels soothed by his smile, and countless handkerchiefs thrown about, waving like white flags of surrender from every air port in Dalmasca.

But Balthier – he is sly, always with another up his breast pocket. He has never surrendered his heart to any woman. Only a queen. Fran knows each part of his heart, but she does not possess it. She needs only her own heart to know him as she does.

Fran has never received a handkerchief, or flirtatious words meant to sway her.

Hers is love, not possession.

* * *

Eruyt Village has ill prepared her for change. It takes years for her to see.

His age, for instance. And his sorrow.

His queen, tired and old and uneager to see him, worn by games of war and succession, in which she participates far too readily. It helps not that her knight is parted from her. The knight– the knight all along, not the pirate; a truth which Balthier, ever a believer in tales, knows too well.

His protégé, years ago killed in the act of theft; the dancer still mourns for him as she hangs up her dreams and runs a shop of dried goods. They visit every now and then. There are more wrinkles around her smile every time, and every time she has fewer words to pass on from the Archadian king's letters.

His father, long dead and still haunting him, because he is without family.

She wants to tell him that she is his past and present and his future. That she will stand by him as he takes his last breaths.

But he smiles at her with his everlasting wit and childishness, and she realizes she can say none of those things to him.

* * *

They continue to his last breath, and Fran realizes that eventually she must move on, looking not a day older than the day she met him. He – he will be the youth forever, now.

He dies of old age, grasping her hand tight. She brings it to her cheek. She feels how cold it is, how wrinkled. She feels the rings, even colder. She takes one for her own. After years of wear, it no longer smells of hume factories. It smells of him.

She takes the pieces of glass – the one with the blue of the winter evening, the other the pink of the summer sunrise – and she leaves them at his grave. They are lost to her now. The sun will rise and the night will fall, but she is no longer a child and she can no longer see how they are anything extraordinary, anything more extraordinary than the sigh of a feeble, fragile, beautiful hume life.


End file.
